Prepare to #PMGrow Like a Pro

Prepare to #PMGrow Like a Pro

You’ve already reviewed the agenda. You’ve packed comfy shoes, a water bottle, electronic chargers, and plenty of business cards. All that’s left to do is set your out-of-office reply, right ?

Yes – and no.

Industry conferences can be fun, educational, and inspiring. But PM Grow Summit is more than just a conference with a lineup of great speakers – it’s for forward-looking professionals who want to grow their business and share big ideas.

To make sure you get the most out of the experience, we’ve asked three of our alumni for their top tips.

Prepare to Make New Friends

“Spend as much time as possible networking with other attendees,” says Robert Gilstrap, two-time PM Grow Summit attendee and owner of Title One Management, LLC in Georgia. “Meals are the best time. Make sure you never sit with the same people twice, so you get new faces and fresh ideas.”

Melissa Prandi, president and CEO of Prandi Property Management, Inc. in California, agrees. “Networking with others” was her biggest takeaway from the conference last year.

Prepare to Learn Something New

For Gilstrap, the information PM Grow Summit provided on financial data was eye-opening.

His key learning moment was learning that “we need to be tracking our numbers and key performance indicators like crazy. Without that, we have no idea where we stand on anything. It’s hard to make decisions on marketing spending or advertising efforts because you have no way to measure their effectiveness.”

For Prandi, it meant reconsidering her human resources. She “changed things around” to create the position of Dedicated Business Development Manager, which was a suggestion she picked up from the conference.

For Andrew Dougill of Hoffman Realty LLC, in Florida, PM Grow Summit was the reality check he needed. “Our customers and the marketing and sales methods we use to connect with them are changing so fast. What worked only a few years ago doesn’t work well today,” he realized.

Don’t Forget Your Follow Through

In a game of golf, your club makes contact with the ball for only a moment. Yet golf pros obsess over the full swing, because the actions you take after the initial contact are critical to your outcome. That’s called the follow through, and it’s just as important in business as it is in golf.

Although PM Grow Summit is only for a short time, the effects on your organization can be monumental. It’s an opportunity to boost your network, innovate your business, and do things differently. That’s reason enough to get excited, and it’s also the motivation you need to get organized.

When the Summit it over, be sure to take the time to:

Add new contacts to LinkedIn.

Clean up your notes

Share them with your colleagues.

List them from easiest to implement to the most difficult, or chronologically in the order in which you want to tackle them.

Either way, “plan a clear schedule after you return home,” says Andrew Dougill. “Because you are going to be implementing some business-changing new systems.”